The image on the left is the word cloud of 'before' sentence, and the right one is the word cloud from 'after'.¶
With the 2 word clouds as the first understanding, we can find some keywords such as 'animal', 'body', 'soul', 'nature', 'god' for 'before' and 'world', 'power', 'existence', 'law' for 'after'.¶
Though the word clouds are not quantitative, we can still make a guess about the related topics of 'before' and 'after':¶
'before' is more focused on nature, biology and actuality while 'after' includes more about the class system.¶
Since most of the word frequencies of both 'female' and 'woman' are contributed by Aristotle and Feminism, we can concentrate on the two schools here.¶
We extract sentences include 'female' and 'woman' separately from Aristotle and Feminism, then check the most mentioned words except stop words.¶
The related words with 'female' here indicate that 'female' connotes a biological category, while 'woman' connotes a whole human person and is more focused on the family and social roles.¶
'Female' here no longer represents a biological category, but rather reflects the deep thinking of individuals from a lower class view by Feminism.¶
'Woman' in the two schools stays about the same meaning.¶
Given the different meanings of 'female' and 'woman' in different times and schools, we can come to the conclusion:¶
The comparable word frequency of 'female' in Aristotle is mainly because philosophers in 'before' focused their topics on natural existence, which exactly matches what 'female' means at the time.¶
Similarly, the reason why 'woman' has little word frequency is that philosophers in 'before' seldom thought about self identity, class system or else.¶
The word clouds of 'female' and 'woman' in Aristotle and Feminism also prove the conclusion!¶
row1: 'female' in Aristotle; 'woman' in Aristotle
row2: 'female' in Feminism; 'woman' in Feminism
Based on gender equality, let's take a look at boys as well:)¶
While the proportion of 'male' in 'before' to 'after' is close to that of 'female', indicating that the case might be the same as we discuss above, 'man' here is a totally different story.¶
Why is 'man' mentioned so often even in 'before'?¶
We just extract sentences as before and see the results first.¶
Given the four graphs, most of the keywords are similar to 'female' and 'woman'.¶
For 'man in Stoicism', there are some unfamiliar words such as 'thou', 'unto', 'doth', 'thy', 'thee'.¶
In fact, these are old-fashioned words that escape stopword package and can't refer to new topics. The left words are still about family and social roles.¶
Since topics remain the same as 'female' and 'woman', the only reason of high word frequency of 'man' in 'before' would be the male-dominated society.¶
We can prove the situation in an indirect way in Chapter 3.¶
This is a plot about the proportion of sentences that mention woman(man) also mention man(woman).¶
Since man and woman are symbols of family and social roles here, the fact that 43.36% of the sentences which mention woman in Aristotle also mention man, and 1.57% for the opposite can reflect such bias.¶
Fortunately the trend is getting better given the plot of Feminism!¶
Philosopher's attitudes towards men and women also follow the trend.¶
Hopefully, this trend will continue until the society achieves gender equality.¶
From this story, we learn about the shift in topics philosophers caring about as well as different meanings in specific words.¶
We know a little more about what philosophers are thinking now!¶
In general, philosophers are always in an effort to change their mind to keep pace with the external and internal world!¶
And more and more are waiting for us to read and discover!¶